How to Search For, Install, and Activate Plugins in WordPress

In this tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how to search for new free plugins from the official WordPress.org plugin repository. I’ll also show you how to install and activate these free plugins.

How to Search for Free Plugins

WordPress makes it extremely easy to search for free plugins and at the time of this writing, there are over 48,000 free plugins available. Wow! No wonder WordPress such a popular platform!

Go to Dashboard–Plugins–Add New

There are two different “Add New” links. You can click either one and they’ll take you to the plugin listing page.

How to search for free WordPress plugins

You’ll see the plugin listing screen which shows you the “Featured” plugins first, a few ways to filter those results, and also the plugin search box.

You can enter any keyword, phrase, or even plugin name in this field. A few examples you might use are “image gallery”, “contact form”, “social sharing”, or any other feature you might be looking to add to your WordPress website.

In this example, I’ve entered the plugin name “Foo Gallery”. You can see that this plugin is the first result but you’ll also notice that another one of our other plugins is listed there too. That’s because we’ve used the same “Foo Gallery” keyword in the other plugin description because they work seamlessly together and also because the plugin author, “FooPlugins” is listed on both.

How to Install and Activate a Free Plugin

To install a free plugin from the search results, simply click “Install Now” and then “Activate”. See exactly how to do it in the short video above.

I hope this tutorial helped you learn how to search for, install, and activate free plugins in WordPress. You might also want to check out my growing list of Resources and Tools I use in many of my projects.

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